


Appalling Human Weakness

by Leamas



Category: Declare - Tim Powers
Genre: 1963 timeline, Torture, elena's self-loathing, which could be its own character tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 15:09:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11164461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leamas/pseuds/Leamas
Summary: Elena's meeting with Kim Philby wasn't as discreet as they'd both hoped it would be. Now she finds herself forced to answer for why she was seen talking to one of the Soviet's most valuable agents, and her silence won't be taken for an answer.





	Appalling Human Weakness

A harsh kick to Elena’s side was met with a stifled gasp, as she’d been alert since she first heard the door open. Elena looked up in time to see another kick aimed in her direction; she turned, so it hit her back instead of her stomach.

She was dragged up and made to sit on her heels. A hand was in her hair, holding her head up. Elena frowned fiercely upward, glowering at the man who the day before had hit her.

“Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga,” he said. “Does the name mean anything to you?”

“Philby gave you my name,” she said. “So what? It’s not a secret.”

“This is not the first time your name has been known to us.”

Again, Elena chose not to speak.

“You were ours, before you defected. And now you’ve been seen with one of our agents.”

“I knew nothing about Philby until you told me.”

“You expect us to believe it’s a coincidence.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Elena said. “Perhaps this is revenge because I got away. Or is it simply convenient to bring me in? Do you want to kill me to feel like you’re serving your people?”

She expected the slap, for her insolence. Being taken by the front of her shirt and thrown to the ground was slightly more of a surprise, as was the knee on the top of her back, held between her shoulder blades. Then she was pulled up by her hair again. A knife was held in front of her face.  She heard as it sawed through her hair.

“This is what they did to women in France who cooperated with the enemy,” the man said. Strands of her white hair fell around her face; she allowed herself to see them but forced herself not to follow their descent as they fluttered to the floor. “Consider this our revenge,” he said, when he was finished. He threw the handful of white on the floor in front of her face. “Everything else is for answers.”

She told herself as they left that this was not the first time her appearance had been changed because of their brutality, and she held that thought as they left her.

 

She knew that she should take what opportunity she had to rest; whatever was coming, she would need all the strength she could endure. But her heart was still racing. She was uncomfortable, and cold. There was a lot to worry about.

Philby would save himself, of course, and deny knowing anything about her. He’d already given away her name, because why would he not? She was nothing to him – not an agent trying to recruit him, certainly. He would say whatever was asked of him if it meant he would not fall under suspicion.

He had an urgent desire to live, and as long as he was still alive, a chance remained for someone else from the SDECE to make contact with him and bring him back. No one needed her. She would be remembered for contacting him first, and for dying bravely and silently in the fight against Communism, a cause she would have given her life for a long time ago.

And she would die. There was no denying it.

How long had it been since she was taken from the street? How far was she taken? She could answer neither of these questions. She was taken shortly after meeting Philby and brought to a small house in the desert. All she had been able to see as they pulled her from the car and marched her inside at gunpoint were mountains, desert, and the road. In the distance, she thought she had heard the call for prayers. The isolation would do the work of cell bars well enough, and with her wrists tied so tightly behind her, she was limited in her movements, anyway.

Two men kidnapped her. One was named Ilia, or at least responded to the name; he was thin and Russian with black hair, and he looked to the other man for instructions. The other man was tall, perhaps six feet, with a broad face and broad shoulders and rough hands. He had light hair and dark eyes and was also Russian. She hadn’t caught a name, but she understood him to be the leader. It was he who she would have to watch out for.

The most important information that Elena took away from any of this was that she was woefully outnumbered, but she already knew that she would die here.

 

“Who else will approach Philby?”

When they kicked her she stayed silent. Apart from the involuntary groans, she would give them nothing; if she could repeat their earlier meetings, she would have never said anything.

“When did you and he agree to next meet?”

They could do nothing besides bark questions to her and beat her, and then killer her. It was a relief, she thought, to already be allowed to come to terms with her death, without anything like hope to rob that from her.

“How many people are aware of this operation?”

She had been hit and kicked, slapped, stepped on, dragged across the floor by what remained of her hair, but so far she had not said a word. Ilia administered most of the beatings. And so it surprised Elena when the leader, who until now had only asked questions, dragged her up by the arm and forced against the wall, crushing her. She couldn’t breathe. Elena struggled, but for all her efforts, she could do nothing a hand took the back of her neck and slammed her face against the wall. She sagged forward when she was released until she dropped to her knees, aware that she could breathe although the rest of her felt numb.

Elena was kicked in the side, and she was turned around to face away from the wall. A foot on her stomach to keep her from falling forward.

“Who else will approach Philby?”

She wanted to groan because of the pain. Her head was fuzzy; the relief of being able to breathe was clouded by the pain that accompanied each lungful of air. They would not stop hurting her until they killed her – until they had the answers they needed from her.

Or until someone else stole Philby away, after which she would be useless and therefore shot.

Elena shook her head. The already spinning room wobbled. She was hit again.

 

She was helped to sit up. The gesture was shockingly gentle. It was Ilia who sat with her; the gentleness with which he touched her shoulder shocked her. He held a glass of water to her mouth to compensate for her bound arms, and supported the back of her head as she drank.

Halfway through the glass he pulled it away. Elena leaned forward, but he held it out of her way; quickly she pulled her head back, conscious of how desperate she must look.

When he spoke his voice was rough. “We know what you are here for. All we ask is to know who else is here. Who else will come for Philby?”

Her throat was dry, her mouth sticky and tasting of blood and dust. If she told them anything – it didn’t have to be the truth – she would be given more. Perhaps she could even lie to help her own cause – she could lead them away from the truth, to buy more time for people to make contact with Philby. And if she weren’t so distracted by how thirsty she was, she would be in a better position to help herself buy time as Philby was removed…

The thought lingered in her head for a moment before being promptly chased out by her own anger with herself. It did nothing to counter the shame of knowing that she’d even considered it. She would die here, herself and God alone knowing that she had not talked.

“Perhaps keep a better eye on your agents,” she said.

The rest of the water was poured down her shirt, and as she was left alone again – cold and damp and thirsty – it was all she could think about.

 

Again, Elena was pulled up to her feet only to be thrown down again. She glared up at her interrogator, who seemed wholly unbothered by her expression. Why would he? She was bruised and beaten, and her breaths came in gasps. At some point her left arm had been yanked from its sockets; beneath her trousers she could feel her knee pulsating against the ground, swollen where it had been kicked. She knew she was at a disadvantage – but regardless, Elena also knew that she would not allow herself to be tempted to speak.

“When do you plan to go to the mountain?”

“Why do you think we would go to the mountain?” Elena asked.

“Stop playing coy,” he said. “We know what you want with Philby – we know what you want there. When will you go?”

Elena scoffed, but said nothing.

“Just answer the question.”

Elena’s memory of Russia was not somewhere she often allowed herself to dwell. She remembered her time in the basement of the Lubyanka – what they’d done to her and forced her to do; what they allowed to be done to their own people, to appease their guardian. Before she knew that, she would have done anything for their cause. It disgusted her to remember. How could they think that anyone who knew the cost of what they did to their own people would willingly work with such a force?

But of course they would think this – if they knew themselves to be capable of such atrocities, why not the West?

She suffocated the instinctual urge she had to protest that she would never. If they thought this was the plan, they would look away when it was time for her people to extract Philby. She could compromise her dignity in their eyes, if only it furthered her mission.

She steeled herself in her silent for the next hit, the slap around her tender face, and for the pressure to be exerted on her foot, now under her his boot.

“When do you plan to go to the mountain?”

 

Elena couldn’t see her hands, and every attempt to look over her shoulder was met with a hand in her hair, wrenching her face around and forcing her to look at her knees. She heard the flicking of a lighter, the opening of a blade; she was lucky that she could not see how red the blade became, although later she would be able to imagine it. It was pressed to the inside of her arms, and as she realised how it hurt, she was in she could not think of anything. She couldn’t stop the noise that came from her mouth, even as she clenched her teeth against the pain. It was a half-realised scream, lingering even after the knife was pulled away. The second time she heard the flick of the lighter, she lurched away from the knife. It was an instinct responding to the cold dread passing through all her nerves, one that insisted she couldn’t last any longer, that her body could not survive that pain again. Elena was dragged back by her bound wrists to where the two men held put her. Ilia was unyielding; her interrogator was unimpressed by her endurance, for he still held the knife in his hand, and the lighter. With the state of her shoulder, the sudden movement was enough to paralyse her with pain. She couldn’t twist away or writhe when the heated metal touched her arm again.

 

When they finished they left her alone. She was allowed to curl over onto her stomach and to wrap her legs close to herself, for whatever protection it would give her. A cold sweat had broken out across her body, and she was shaking. She didn’t hear when the door opened, or when another man walked into the room; it was only at the sound of a lighter opening that she became aware of him.

It wasn’t either of the two men keeping watch over her. He looked Armenian. When she forced herself to look over her shoulder at him, he gave her no response.

What would he do to her now? Why was he here? Would he hurt her more? Or was he simply here to watch as Elena lay here, weak and ill and degraded?

A sudden rush of anger came over her. She had screamed when the knife touched her again, and the third time, but she had not talked, or given them what they asked for. Did they intend to unsettle her by introducing a new person to her? Did they really think she would talk after having endured _that_?

Elena couldn’t say why it hurt like it did to imagine that yes, they did think that of her. It stung in the same way it bothered her to know they could think her willing to bring Philby to the mountain and desecrate her soul again. It wasn’t as though they thought her so personally responsible for the calamities they assumed of her, and yet it felt that she and she alone was being accused.

Elena closed her eyes and prayed. It didn’t matter; the truth was unchangeable. Even if she died here among those who thought her to truly be that weak, God would know her better.

Her arms were agony; she couldn’t imagine that they would be back tomorrow for more, and do that to her again. What would she do when they returned? Would the threat be enough to make her weak? Would she be able to withstand this same pain again?

Would she be forgiven if she was not strong enough?

No. Of course not. She would never be.

Elena prayed again for the strength to withstand what came next.

 

What came next was a bucket of cold water poured over her, and Ilia dragging her to her knees. The ropes were cut. All three men stood in the room with her. There was no time to prepare herself as her arms were pulled over her head and held there. She was incapacitated by the pain and left breathless. She thought she would throw up as her arms were dropped to her side, and then again when they were forced through the sleeves of her blouse. Her shirt came off. When the man reached for her trousers she struggled, weakly, only to find to her horror that she could not move her arms at all.

When he finished, their leader knelt in front of her. He eyed her critically. Elena glared back with as much defiance as she could muster through the pain, and her new sense of vulnerability. He looked over, wrinkled his nose. “You’re disgusting.”

With his hand he motioned for the Armenian man next to him, and the second bucket of water was poured over her.

There wasn’t any part of her that wasn’t a collection of dark, colourful bruises, red and blue, in the shape of boots and hand prints and collections of colours that were so superimposed atop one another that Elena couldn’t see where one ended and the next began. Her legs twitched, unknown to her; she couldn’t move either of her arms. The burns looked worse than she thought; she couldn’t stand to look at them long enough to be certain.

Someone gathered her clothes off the floor.

Someone else said, “We can’t do much about the smell.”

She thought they were leaving, but before they did she was dragged up, her arms pulled behind her. New rope was used to bind her wrists, over where they were cracked ad bleeding and raw. She didn’t fight when they were pulled behind her this time – she begged, knowing she couldn’t withstand the pain of the constant pressure her shoulders would be under if she were to be left like this.

“If you give us our answers, we’ll untie you,” their leader said. She wished that she knew his name. “We’ll give you something to wear. You won’t be cold.”

Elena shook her head, closed her eyes. “You won’t.”

There was a moment’s hesitation. Elena expected to be hit again. “You’re right,” he finally said. “But we will kill you fast. You won’t have to hurt anymore.”

Elena shook her head, and when she was alone she couldn’t tell why she was shaking.

 

The knife was back, and the lighter. The Armenian man stood behind her and held her arms; her interrogator sat in front of her, with one hand on each knee to hold her legs apart. She couldn’t make herself look at him. She couldn’t look away from the lighter, in the hands of Ilia. He held the flame under the knife until the blade was red. Then he knelt down beside her. Until now, her breathing had stayed miraculously steady; she couldn’t help her change as he brought the blade closer to her thigh. She looked away.

Her interrogator her said, “If you don’t watch, it will go inside you.”

And so Elena watched as the blade was brought down over thigh, held only an inch away so she could feel the radiant heat. She watched as it touched her. The pain reached her a moment later and blinding her. No part of her body felt real; she knew she was in pain but she could not identify a single part that hurt. It surrounded her like the cold, and like the feeling of bodies surrounding her and touching her – it was everything she was aware of, but she couldn’t clearly identify it.

The knife pulled away. She watched as the knife was reheated, smelled the pieces of her own skin that stuck to it burn; felt the radiant heat on her thigh; felt herself shake and try to turn away. She said no, she couldn’t, and was again asked if she had anything to say. The remnants of her defiance boiled away as the knife touched her again.

“Yes,” she said when she could speak again. “I am a spy. I am with the SDECE, I approached Kim Philby,” and she agreed with everything else they asked, although what, she couldn’t keep track of. They thought she was on an expedition to the mountain. When asked when and with who, Elena shook her head. She couldn’t think of an answer and so panicked; she smelled burning skin again, whether real or not, and shook under their touch.

“I don’t know,” she said, insisted. “That wasn’t part of my job.”

“Yours was to recruit Philby.” She allowed the gaps to be filled in; agreed that kidnapping was an option, too, if necessary, and mentioned a few times and locations. Some of what she said was the truth.

“There’s nothing we wouldn’t have done to get him,” she added.

As a reward she was allowed something clean to drink.

Alone, Elena was certain that if she could free herself she would use the rope to hang herself. If she had the strength, she would have bit off her tongue and swallowed it, but her jaw was too battered and weak.

 

The house Philby was brought to was small, isolated, so far away from anywhere that it would not be seen by anyone except for those passing by the road, who would notice it as they left the city and may only linger on it for the lack of anything else to look at. Stepping out of the car into the cold, early January air he allowed himself a brief glance around. The lights from the nearest town could be seen from the road; Beirut’s lights glowed like a torch on the horizon, held up against the cloudy sky.

“Out of everywhere, th-this is where you w-want to bring me?” Philby demanded. “If I d-disappear n-now, it will _hardly_ b-be discrete.”

“There’s no other way,” the man who drove him here.

“P-people will notice,” Philby insisted. “My wife, to start.”

The man had introduced himself as Nikol. Philby doubted this was his real name; he hesitated a moment before answering, when Philby called him. He was Armenian, and spoke fluent Russian – he’d told Philby this, in the way of making conversation. Right now he looked at Philby with something between pity and irritation. It was early for him, too, after all.

“I’m afraid there’s no other way, Kim. You are in danger.”

“Th-this whole operation is in d-danger, if anyone notices I’m m-missing,” Philby snapped. “And they will. They’ll assume I’ve been kidnapped, or that I’ve d-d-defected.”

“If we didn’t bring you here, I’m afraid you really would have been kidnapped,” Nikol said. “And when this is over, it finally will be time for you to defect.”

The pitying, patient look in his eyes held Philby’s for a long time; gradually, Philby relaxed, recognising that for now, there was only one way for Philby to go. That way was inside the house.

His chances for escape were gradually dwindling. His only weapon he could find was his seeming cooperation, and his professed willingness to see this through to the end. If he didn’t work something else out, he might just have to.

He had feared the worst when he had been approached about Elena, complete with photos of her taken at the table, and as she was leaving. Was she anyone to worry about? Philby had answered, easily, saying that she was no one. She had approached him, he said, and described how she caught his eye and walked over to him, how she touched his arm – and he had moved his own hand along his forearm to demonstrate – and how delightful she seemed. She was interested in him, presumably as a woman would be interested in a man, and he found her attractive. No, he hadn’t seen her before – he would remember a woman as striking as her, he was certain. He thought he was convincing on that point.

That had been the end of it, seemingly, until a few days later when Elena did not make their next arranged meeting, or their pre-arranged fallback. And he didn’t miss how he was being followed, whether they meant to be discrete. His options were limited, and gradually growing smaller; as he walked through the door, a sense of dread overtook him. The next time he left could very well be to send him en-route to realise his destiny.

When he got inside, he asked, “Can you at l-least get me a goddamn drink?”

 

Elena could only remember snapshots of what she’d confessed to and barely any of what she’d agreed with. She knew she hadn’t told the truth, but she’d said enough of the plans to extract Philby. It gave her no comfort; the truth only mattered so much when faced against results.

In the end she had not been strong enough. Her faith had amounted to nothing. What could she do now? There was no way to escape the pain she was in, and no way that she could remedy her current predicament. She wanted to withdraw from herself but couldn’t. How had she withdrawn in Moscow? How had she driven forward every time she’d felt herself grow weak in the past? Where was the intensity she’d nurtured in Spain, the drive the carried her through France, the strength she grew every day of her life?

It was as non-existent as she was, dissolved in the cold and the pain.

Elena closed her eyes. She had seen enough people die to know that there was little she could do for herself – she allowed herself to feel thankful for the cold, the pain, and for how far away her own body seemed from her now. Soon she would be dead. Perhaps if she was very lucky she would never be found.

 

The benefits of the isolation, and how small the house was, were that Philby was mostly alone. After a few drinks Philby put his head down in one of the makeshift bed and waited for Nikol to sleep. He didn’t have to wait for long.

Philby slipped out of the bedroom and away into the room beside his, guided by moonlight. The first room he walked through was the kitchen; Nikol was asleep on the sofa in one of the other rooms. So what would he do now?

It would be in his interest to wait. Where would he leave to if he left now? His Soviet handlers would be looking for him, and would know that he’d run. With no guarantee of protection or immunity, he would be stranded. What then? And if the Soviets were to be believed, the risk of kidnapping remained. While it might be better than being taken to the mountain, Philby wasn’t willing to sacrifice his freedom. If there was another option, he was going to take it.

But to stay was a different worry – what if this new threat prompted them to move faster, to bring him up to the mountain before anyone noticed his absence? Before he could escape?

There was only one choice Philby saw as reasonable. He had to get out, and to hope luck would continue guide him the rest of the way, as it had so often before.

The car was gone and so Philby would have to walk. Fine. It was dangerous and stupid, but he would have to try. He wasn’t ready to just leave, however. Although it was risky, Philby knew that he had to bring something along to bargain with, if such a thing was available. Any information was useful, and he had so little else to rely on. And anyway – it wasn’t in his nature to leave without allowing himself a thorough search.

There were two rooms connected to the kitchen: one had been graciously given to him to sleep in. The other was locked. Upon finding no key, he knelt on one knee in front of the door and shimmied the lock, listening with his ear against the wood and for the sound of his Nikol’s breathing. When he finally got the door open, he waited for a moment until he was certain that the click of the lock hadn’t woken him. Then, slowly, Philby eased the door open. Thankfully it was silent.

The first thing that hit him was the smell, like piss and vomit and blood. As his eyes adjusted to the new darkness, Philby found there was very little in this room. It was devoid of furniture, and he saw only the dark shape in the corner. A body, Philby realised, although from the smell he could tell that it wasn’t dead.

Carefully Philby eased in, silently closing the door behind him. He reached for his lighter, illuminating the room with something other than the moonlight. At the click of the lighter he heard a whimper in response. And then he saw the body of Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga.

She looked worse than Philby could have imagined. He edged closer, careful to keep his footsteps soft on the concrete floor and taking note of the water and blood dried onto it; to the smell of piss that made him lightheaded; to how she trembled. She was naked, and faced away from him. With only his lighter to help him see, he couldn’t make out the full extent of her injuries but he saw dark bruises covering her. As he knelt close behind her, careful to avoid kneeling in anything wet (although after a point it became impossible) he could hear how quickly her breaths came, and how they sped up the closer he came.

Her shoulder, he noted, was small enough that his entire hand could cover it. It looked to be attached to her torso only by her skin.

“I w-wondered where you were,” Philby murmured, softly. He watched as she turned her face closer to the floor. There were bruises on the back of her head, too, and dried blood. He touched what was left of her hair, now matted and no longer as white; not glowing in the darkness like it had nearly fifteen years ago, but melting into her dirty skin instead.

“Look at me,” he ordered, and moved the lighter closer to examine the damage. Her shoulders were both dislocated, clearly. On the inside of her thighs he saw a dark burn, blistering and beginning to fester; he saw the same on her arms.

“Go,” Elena said, her voice hoarse.

“And then what?” Philby asked. “I’d have much b-better luck if you were with me.”

“Go,” Elena repeated. “Say you have my blessing.”

“S-say so yourself,” Philby said. “I have a—a _slight_ suspicion th-those words will mean more coming from your mouth, my dear.”

“I can’t,” Elena said. “Leave me here, and go. Tell them–” she stopped talking. Her voice sounded so flat that Philby barely noticed the difference.

“D-don’t be stupid,” Philby said, and sighed. Despite the cold, he pulled off his jacket and gently lay it over her, giving her something resembling decency. He didn’t miss how she shivered beneath it, now given something for the warmth for the first time in what Philby presumed was a while.

There was nothing immediately on his person that could be used to cut the ropes, so he figured he’d just have to work quickly. They were thick, and the knots were strong. His fingers scrambled against them to untie them, before he forced himself to slow down and take them methodically.

If he was caught doing this there would be no plausible deniability that he was just leaving because he so strongly believed that hiding was a detriment to the mission, and decided to take measures into his own hands. Even that would be a weak defence, and he hated the panic the thought brought him. Elena would be shot, and what would he do then? He needed her alive, to vouch for him. Rescuing her at such a personal risk to himself would be a convincing test of his sincerity.

A noise from the other side of the door briefly pulled his attention away from Elena, and the ropes. He paused, lifting his head to listen. Was it anything to worry about, or just the sounds of the dessert? He couldn’t tell with any certainty. But a long moment passed, and after a while, when there was nothing else, he turned his attention back to Elena. With no lights it was now becoming increasingly difficult to work; he had only the moonlight and the feeling of the ropes on her delicate wrists to guide him.

“You must be quiet,” Philby murmured, speaking instructions to her because he had no guidance of his own. “Th-there’s no car – they took it – s-so we’ll have to walk. You can, right?”

Elena remained unresponsive. Philby continued, willing himself to have some patience as he worked through the knots.

Another noise from outside the room, this one undeniable.

“Leave,” Elena said. “Pretend you didn’t see me. When you can get away, do. Don’t let them take you to the mountain.”

How tempting, he thought, to leave, and to truly pretend that he’d seen nothing. If only he didn’t need her. The thought struck him as horrific, but he knew that it to be true; she was the closest thing to hope that he had. As it turned out, the sound of footsteps in the other room made his decision easy. Being caught like this would be the end of him.

Philby stood up. “I’ll b-be back. Try your b-best to wait.”

 

The door opened and Elena expected to the worst, but to her surprise it was Philby who returned, this time brandishing a knife. He crouched behind her and with the knife made short work of the ropes. When he peeled them away she heard him say something she didn’t quite catch. The ropes were pulled away from her own flesh, like tearing. She grimaced against the pain. As Philby helped her sit up she managed to hold back any sounds. The pain in her arms was becoming unbearable, made worse by every moment until Philby had her leaning against a wall, and took her shoulders in his hands and one at a time, wrenched them back into place.

Elena hunched forward, shaking and taking shallow breaths until Philby touched her elbow and moved it back. She froze, rigid in place, the memory of her arms being wrenched backwards and held over her head still too fresh.

“Be quiet,” Philby hissed. “What’s wrong? I should th-think that should take care of your arms, f-for now.” He touched the joint of her shoulder, and again Elena pulled away.

“Get away,” she said. “Someone will find you. Leave the knife, but leave.”

But even if Philby did leave, Elena knew she did not have the strength to turn the knife on herself, or to withstand the protest of her shoulders to use it. She fell silent. Next to her, Philby sat down a pair of trousers that looked far too large for her, and a shirt. It buttoned at the front, and she watched as Philby unbuttoned it and held it over her shoulders.

“M-move your arms,” Philby murmured. “Slip them through the sleeves, c-come on. I – I _know_ you’re in pain, but you m-must be able to manage this.”

Elena couldn’t speak. She felt Philby’s hands move, one taking her wrist and pulling it through the sleeve, and then doing the same with the other. It hurt but she let him move her body; it occurred to her that the only reason her own clothing hadn’t been cut away was to hurt her by wrenching her arms about, and she felt ill. It was humiliating, in much the same way that Philby’s help was now.

When he finished helping her into the stolen shirt, Philby slipped a hand around her waist and pulled her too her feet. Although she was unsteady she found some balance. When her legs brushed against each other the pain from her burns started again, and she shook even harder against him. With the coordination of a parent, Philby helped her into the pair of trousers he’d stolen for her.

“That sh-should do,” Philby murmured against his. “For now, anyway. F-follow my lead, if it pleases you.”

It didn’t, but Philby carried most of her weight and Elena’s body moved instinctively to be near his. Progress was slow, annoyingly so. As they walked through the house Elena was only conscious of the fact that she was seeing more than just the room she’d been confined in, and how normal it looked.

Philby opened the front door to the house. It was dark outside; Elena could only guess at the time. Yesterday she’d been alone, and cold, hoping that she would never be found. Now Elena felt herself already shaking legs wobble. Tears came to her eyes. A lump caught in her throat and she felt her breathing strain. Worse, she felt Philby’s arm tighten around her, to hold her closer against him.

Then a car pulled into the drive, and Elena froze.

 

A gun held to Philby’s face. A man Philby recognised as Russian, but not one of his handlers, said to him: “Go back inside.”

“Y-y-you c-can’t shoot me,” Philby snapped. He held Elena closer to himself. The man with the gun drew nearer. In the car, a second man was getting out. He, too, seemed armed.

“Turn around, and go back inside.”

Philby thought of the state he’d found Elena in. They’d do similar to him – keep him bound, before dragging him up the mountain to receive his birthright. And then, with a detachment that he’d come to accept as characteristic of himself, he knew that he would not allow that.

 _Mount Ararat is not my only birthright_.

“Bring me b-back to Beirut,” Philby said. His hand moved down Elena’s waist. “For God’s sake, I said I’d go! Th-this is w-what I w-was born for!”

His hand finally found the pocket of his jacket, and inside, the gun he’d found while stealing the knife from a sleeping Nikol. Quickly he drew it, aiming and firing at the man holding a gun to him, at the same time as he pushed Elena to the ground. Another shot was fired – this hit the loose flesh in his arm, where Elena’s head had been a moment earlier. But adrenaline was on his side. He turned to the man who shot him and fired again, feeling as he did so the additional force accompanying his movements. The car was still running. Using the animalistic urge to get away from what just almost killed him as motivation, Philby pulled Elena up from the ground and ran to the car, ignoring how she felt in his arms and the pained moans as he threw her into the passenger’s seat. Nikol was joining them outside, having been drawn out by the commotions and the gunshot. Philby watched him shoot at the car just as he reversed, and drove along the empty streets as quickly as possible.

 

The adrenaline carried Philby for the first several miles, until they were far out of Beirut and on an open road, accompanied only by the occasional late-night traveller, and the moon peering over the horizon. His hands shook, to his disgust. The pain in his arm from where he had been shot was getting worse.

Elena remained silent, except for when he swerved. The wound in his arm or the alcohol or the recent brain injury impaired his driving, he regretted to find, and every so often he found himself pulling the car quickly back and straightening, trying to maintain control over it.

When the pain finally grew to be too much and the last of the adrenaline was replaced by the overwhelming urge to pull over by the side of the road and rest his head, Philby found a hotel and paid for a room for two, paying extra for the inconvenience of it being at night. He couldn’t return to Beirut, or to anywhere his Soviet handlers would recognise him.

He walked with Elena up to the room, supporting her awkwardly with one arm and twisting his body to balance her weight as he unlocked and opened the door, like he did in the past with his children. He then carefully guided her to the bed and eased her down, before looking around the room. It was the only part of the world he could guarantee as his, and only for the night.

 

Elena heard the sound of running water. She turned her head towards the bathroom and watched Philby splash water on his face and run it through his hair, stiffly favouring his right arm. When he finished he leaned against the sink and closed his eyes. For a moment, he didn’t move. Elena watched. Somewhere, in the part of her that was still processing what was happening around her, she began to wonder if he was not on the verge of unconsciousness, when he finally opened his eyes again and looked at her.

A frown crossed his face. With a grimace, he reached for the door.

“Try to g-get some rest, Miss Ceniza-Bendiga,” he said. “I’ll join you shortly, although I’m af-f-fraid we won’t have quite the same n-night like we did before.”

He closed the door.

There was no part of her that did not hurt. The pain touched her deeper than her exhaustion. The only relief to be found anywhere was that some feeling returned to her arms, the heaviness lifting from her shoulders; she could pull Philby’s jacket tighter around her, if she wanted to, although to do so still hurt.

Once again, she owed her life to Kim Philby. Once again, he had seen her at her lowest, her most degraded. At least before it would have been by her own hand that she died. At least when he took her to bed, it had been her own choice – a misguided choice, one made prematurely, but hers. It wasn’t even the certainty of death that she dreaded. Had she died, she would have accepted it. But she hadn’t. And not only had her body been broken, twisted, and torn away from her, but _she_ had broken. Again, her faith had been tested, and she lost.

Looking around the room Elena saw that it was respectable, yet modest; it was nowhere she recognised. For that matter, Elena had not recognised anything from the journey. She couldn’t recall where she had been held, nor could she say for certain how long. Although she sat in this room, she felt very far removed from it, like she was looking in at it through a window from somewhere deep within herself.

But it would be better if she did not think about her body, though, or acknowledge it at all.

Where would she go now? Where could she go? The only guarantee she had was that Philby truly as committed to leaving his Soviet masters – he would not have taken such a risk to save her if that weren’t the case – but what good was it to know that? There was no way for Elena to continue, for her integrity had died in that room, at the same time as her endurance and conviction failed her. She would be lying if she tried to tell herself now that there was anything she wouldn’t have done at that moment if it meant she wouldn’t have had to be in any more pain.

 

Philby opened the door. He had done what he could, struggling out of his shirt and washing the wound with what passed for warm water, then bandaging it with some unfortunate towel. He could not remove the bullet from his arm; he was lucky it hadn’t passed through him, and that it had not been his right arm, and that no bones had been broken.

 For now he was free. Wounded, displace, and on the run – but alive, and not under Soviet control. What would happen next, he could only dread – they needed him to make it to the mountain, and he couldn’t imagine them giving up once they realised he was gone. Once that reassurance had acted as a safety net: a final security that he still had a place in the world. Now it hung above him like a noose, because they would never stop looking for him. Philby knew what dealings with the djinn involved, and what special fanaticism it inspired in people.

“I’ll look at y-you next,” Philby heard himself say, despite wanting nothing more than to drink and then find himself passed out on the bed for as long as it was still his, or until the pain in his arm became so great that he could do nothing with it.

“Don’t bother.”

“I must.”

The look of loss no longer adorned her bruised, grazed face. She looked at him with a lucid awareness and intensity familiar to him from when he’d watched her glare at him from behind her gun. It was the memory of that that caused him to hesitate before he knelt in front of her.

When he finally spoke, his words were not what he meant to say.

“W-would you believe,” he said, “that in all my years in this game I—I have n-n-never killed a man before today? Well, not d-directly.”

Her graze was critical.

“I suppose your life has offered you little opportunity.”

“Well, yes,” he said. “And I hate to—to dirty my hands in that way. I m-much prefer to w-work from a distance. To l-let _others_ protect me.”

In the bathroom he’d been unable to stop his hands from shaking. Partially, that had been the wound. And because the realisation occurred to him that he was truly on the run, hiding in the bathroom of this hotel, treating the wound he received after being shot for the second time within two weeks. That was how far his desperation had pushed him.

“I wouldn’t have even died,” he said. “It’s n-not m-m-my birthday, you see.”

Elena dropped her gaze. When she refused to speak and the silence dragged on, Philby took her festering wrist and drew it nearer to him. After some initial resistance, she let him. Gently, he pushed the sleeve of her shirt further up her arm, passed the burns on the inside of her elbow. Recalling how she looked on the floor, he knew that there was another burn on her other arm that was as infected and pus-filled and damp as this, blending into the assortment of discolouration and bruises.

“I s-see you were given the best t-treatment,” Philby said. Elena pulled her arm closer to herself with minimal strength. He imagined that she would have pulled harder, had the full use of her arms. “We’ll have to do something about that, before the infection g-gets worse. And your leg, for that matter.”

“No,” Elena said, quickly.

“Why f-fucking not?”

She shook her head. “It’s unnecessary. It can wait.”

“Until when?” he demanded. “In case you’ve f-forgotten, I need you w-well as quickly as p-p-possible, if we want to get anywhere. And we d-do.”

“You should leave,” Elena said.

“I think it’s in m-my b-b-best interest to b-bring you along,” Philby said, “to help with n-negotiations about my f-future. Surely you don’t think I s-saved you from the goodness of my own h-heart?”

“Then you shouldn’t have,” she said plainly. “You should have run.”

“Did you not hear me?” Philby asked. He realised he was raising his voice, and hated that as much as he hated what he heard himself saying to her: “I couldn’t leave you. I needed you.”

“It was my fault they took you,” Elena said. “Had I not said anything, they never would have—have felt it necessary to take you out of harm’s way. But I did.”

She wasn’t looking at him, nor down at her hand, at the open wounds on her arm, but through the bathroom door where moments before Philby stood as he cleaned his bullet wound and contemplated that he had just killed someone by his own hand.

“This again,” Philby said. “F-fifteen years pass and y-you still believe th-there’s no failure as—as _disappointing_ as yours. Do you really think you’re the first spy to talk under torture?”

“Of course not.”

“But yours is the most important, r-right?”

“I compromised the operation.”

“M-many operations have b-been compromised b-by far less,” Philby snapped. “Although I suppose that doesn’t matter to you. _You_ talked, and now y-you won’t let me tend to the wound that pushed you to do it. Because it’s f-fair, right? Which was the final blow? Which kick?”

He grabbed her hip and felt how she tensed beneath him. “Or was it when your shoulders were dislocated?” His hand moved to her shoulders now; he recalled how she moaned when he untied her, and how her entire body shuddered with the pain as he pushed her shoulders back into place. “Or maybe you were raped. Or it was threatened. Or, was it one of these burns?”

His hands skimmed down the length of her arms and she pulled them back against her chest. The movements were stilted on account of the pain. When she looked at him, Philby recognised her expression as hate.

“I failed,” she said simply, coldly.

“And I,” he said, like a confession revealed in anger, “need you to b-bring me back if I am to l-live. I h-have nothing else to p-protect me. Do you think I f-fucking care if you failed?”

She didn’t take his eyes off him. He wondered if she wanted to look away as much as he did, and if she couldn’t bring herself for reasons that were similar to his own. Instead they both watched each other, unable to shy away from their appalling human weakness.

 

When Philby finished cleaning Elena’s wounds with what meagre supplies he had, Elena allowed him to put her to bed. A moment later he joined her. Beneath the covers, her body felt disjointed. It was early morning, and the sun was beginning to come through the windows from behind the thin curtains.

As exhausted as she was, sleep was impossible. Her body was ill-assembled and liable to fall apart if she wasn’t there to keep an eye on it. Evidently, Philby faced a similar problem, rolling over multiple times before finally moving to her side of the bed, close enough that they could touch shoulders and arms.

Elena turned to look at him, and was surprised despite herself to see his pale blue eyes studying her.

She realised it was he who was trembling, rather than herself.

“W-what did you s-s-say, if I may be so bold?”

“They think we are planning a trip to the mountain ourselves,” she said, “to collect a _guardian_ of our own. I told them this was true, and that it was my job to recruit you for this mission.”

“Please tell me it isn’t.”

“Of course not,” Elena said. “But I was recruiting you. I told them we would kidnap you if you did not come.”

“And so they kidnapped me instead,” Philby said. Elena doubted it was the same experience she had been through. “So you didn’t even confess the truth.”

“What does the truth matter, except for the consequences?”

“Indeed,” he agreed. “It doesn’t m-matter remotely.”

Every time Elena felt herself begin to drift a jolt ran through her, and she tensed as though she expected to be hit. Gradually, over the course of several new momentary, abrupt awakenings, Elena found Philby to be asleep next to her.

Reluctantly, she settled, allowing herself the brief respite of feeling his warm beside her, his skin against hers. If all she could do was bring him back, then she would do it. She would see him brought to safety, and see her job through to the end.

 


End file.
